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interested in learning to play, would you? We could have games easier than
people who don't live here could come over. It's a good game. It really is.
You'd like it, I think."
He was pathetically eager to have her want to play. No she changed her mind.
He was pathetically eager to have anybody to play against, and she seemed
handy. She almost told him no, which was her first impulse. Then she
remembered all the things her folks said about the need to get along with the
Mazzillis. Gianfranco would be very unhappy if she turned him down . . . and
Rails across Europe had looked interesting.
"I suppose we could try," she said slowly. "I'm not going to let it get in the
way of my schoolwork, though and you shouldn't, either." He couldn't afford
that as well as she could. His grades were weaker. He had to know it, so she
didn't bother spelling it out for him.
The way his face lit up when she said yes convinced her she'd done the right
thing. It was almost like feeding a stray puppy you found in the street.
"Grazie!" he said, and then, "Do you want to start now?"
"Well. . ." Again, she almost said no. She didn't quite. "We won't be able to
play very long, because I have to help get supper ready and I do need to study
this Russian, and some other stuff, too."
He hardly heard her she could tell. "I'll be right back," he said, and dashed
from the common kitchen into the Mazzil-lis' rooms. Maybe he paused to say
hello to his mother and father. Then again, maybe he didn't. He sure
reappeared in nothing flat, the box with the game in it clutched firmly in his
hands. He sat down across the table from Annarita.
"What do I have to do?" she asked, thinking, It has to be better than Russian.
It turned out to be more complicated than Russian. As far as Annarita was
concerned, that wasn't easy, but Rails across Europe managed. Building your
railroad and shipping things from here to there were pretty straightforward.
After that, though, things got stickier. You could let the other player use
your track if he paid you, but how did you know how much to ask for? What
happened if you were both shipping the same product into the same town? How
did you deal with natural disasters? And so on, and so on.
Gianfranco did a better job of explaining than Annarita would have expected.
He knew the game backward and forward and inside out. Sometimes he tried to
tell her more than she needed to know. Mostly, though, he stuck with the
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
basics till they ran into something hard. Then he told her how that worked.
As far as she could see, he didn't try to take unfair advantage because she
wasn't sure what she was doing. When she thanked him for that, he looked
surprised. "It wouldn't be any fun if I did," he said. "Who cares if you win
if you've got to cheat to do it?"
"Lots of people would say the point of winning is winning, and who cares how
you do it?" Annarita answered.
"But if you know you didn't win square, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth,"
Gianfranco said. "Or if it doesn't, it ought to."
"Si. I think the same thing. But plenty of people don't," she said.
After about half an hour, her mother called her to help cook. "What do you
think?" Gianfranco asked as he marked places and put their cards and play
money into separate envelopes.
"It's not bad," Annarita said. "I can see it's not the kind of game where you
get good as soon as you've played once. I've still got a lot to learn."
"I m still learning," Gianfranco said. "That loss-leader trick Carlo tried to
pull on me a while ago ... I had no idea that was in the rules, but it is." He
held up the rule book.
"It's thick enough," Annarita said. "Probably all kinds of other sneaky things
hiding in there, too."
"Do you want to study it?" Gianfranco asked.
"Maybe another time," she said. "If I start looking at it, I won't study my
Russian, and I've got to." She sighed. "I think Comrade Montefusco's teaching
us to speak it better than the Russians do themselves." She told him about the
classroom visitors they'd had.
"I don't care if the Russians were the first Communists," Gianfranco said.
"Nobody'd pay any attention to them if they weren't the biggest, strongest
country in the world."
"That's true, but be careful who hears you say it," Annarita warned. She was
glad to get away to help her mother cut up a chicken and chop vegetables.
Quietly, so her voice wouldn't carry over the sound of chopping, her mother
asked, "Are you really playing that silly game with Gianfranco?"
"It's not silly. It's kind of interesting, as a matter of fact," Annarita
answered, also in a low voice. Her mother snorted. "It is," Annarita insisted.
"It's complicated as anything, too."
"So is a car's engine. That doesn't make it interesting, not unless you're a
mechanic," her mother said. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]